Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Skills) Share this | Hansard source

We just had 10 minutes of nothing—no response to what we know is a crisis. The Minister for Health has nothing to offer. This House has heard before that a government can be judged on how it cares for its most vulnerable. Think of our children, think of young people, think of people with a disability, think of our aged: this government fails on every score. They have no commitment to early childhood education. Families are struggling to pay for child care. They're failing to deal with the youth unemployment crisis. The member for Maribyrnong will tell us that the NDIS is a mess. These are all travesties, yes, but can anything be more shameful than the way they are failing our elderly? Is there any more concerning indication of the fact that they are failing as a government than what they are failing to do for our elderly citizens? Billions and billions have been cut from the aged-care budget. The litany of failures is longer than your arm. Sadly, so many of us have all had the experience of worrying about our loved ones, struggling to care for them while we work, knowing they're at home alone during the day, and struggling to juggle care for our children as well.

Aged-care packages are supposed to help with that stress. They should help a little bit to relieve some of that worry—to perhaps keep mum and dad in their home just that little bit longer. But, no, this government can't even do that. We've heard from our shadow minister that 100,000 people are on a waiting list with a wait time of almost three years. We've heard that 30,000 people on that list have died and 25,000 people have been driven prematurely into residential aged care, and, even then, the waiting list for residential aged care is 152 days. What of residential aged care?

I would like to make the point that there are so many wonderful people trying their hardest to care for their charges. I give a big shout-out to the aged-care workforce. But, so many terrible stories are coming our way. Complaints have doubled in one year alone. Right now people are fearful. My dear father-in-law, in his 80s, cannot bring himself to watch the reports on television. He told me it terrifies him. How good is that? We have an elder generation that is terrified. We, their children, are terrified. The situation is so appalling that the government called a royal commission, pretty much into themselves and their lack of commitment to the aged-care sector.

Associate Professor Sarah Holland-Batt is a concerned citizen who gave evidence at the royal commission. She gained some public attention. She wrote about her father. She said: 'He was a brilliant, kind and educated man who lives with a greatly diminished quality of life due to the physical and psychological injuries he sustained in aged care. He contributed much to Australia during his working life as a brilliant metallurgical engineer. Now it's very sad to see that he has experienced the full force of the catastrophic failures that regularly occur in our aged-care system, such as major injuries due to chronic understaffing; misdiagnosis; inadequate clinical care due to an undertrained, casualised workforce; deliberate mistreatment and cruelty; and indifference and neglect.' She also noticed that the royal commission's interim report has revealed that this government's inertia has played out against a backdrop of escalating failures in the sector with a 170 per cent increase in risk notices and a 292 per cent increase in serious noncompliance. Between 2003-13 there was a 400 per cent increase in preventable deaths in aged care—disgraceful.

In 2017-18 alone there were 3,773 reportable assaults in Australian aged care. This sector is in crisis. There's no transparency and accountability of funding and we don't know if taxpayer funds go to care or to the Cayman Islands. There are not enough resources for monitoring compliance and there's little response when the problems are found. Their response? Some crumbs of funding for aged-care packages that will nowhere near meet the demand and privatising the aged-care assessment services. As the shadow minister has pointed out, this is about the only part of the system that is working okay and the government lied, blatantly, about it being a recommendation of the royal commission. The commissioners were obliged to publicly say that they, in fact, did not make that recommendation. The system is in crisis, and this government's response is a total failure because they simply don't care.

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